Literary Birthday – 21 July – Michael Connelly

Happy Birthday, Michael Connelly, born 21 July 1956

Quotes

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more.

Keep your head down. In other words, keep it in the story. Don’t look up at what is going on in publishing. Forget the trends or what stories are the focus of hot deals, etc. Just write your story, the one you know that you would like to read.

I’m a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there’s a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.

I think there’s a general misconception that anything written quickly lacks quality, and I don’t believe that.

That’s the irony in the work: the best stories are the worst things that happen. My best times were somebody else’s worst.

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

I went into journalism to learn the craft of writing and to get close to the world I wanted to write about – police and criminals, the criminal justice system.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.

I work in the mornings. In the afternoon I take care of busy work. Then I like to work again at night. On the weekends I try to work a little bit in the morning, then take the rest of the day off.

Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.

Michael Connelly is an American author of crime fiction. He is most famous for his novels featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch. He won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992 for The Black Echo. The latest in the series is Two Kinds of Truth. With over 60 million copies of his books sold and translated into 39 languages, he is one of the world’s most successful writers. He was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004.